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VY: Okay, so let's back up a little bit to your early days in Chicago. I just wanted to talk a little bit more about where you lived, what your apartment was like, if you remember, if you have any strong memories of what your apartment looked like, what it smelled like, and if you ever went to visit other friends and if their apartments were different. What was the, sort of, ethnic makeup of the area, were most of your neighbors Japanese Americans or different, that sort of thing.

DC: Thank you. So the apartment that we lived in, that I lived in with my parents and my sisters was on a floor that was different than the apartment that my brothers lived in with my grandfather and my uncle, Mr. Hachiya. So we were physically separated in that sense, but we were still in the same complex, and that building was called LaSalle Mansion, and it was owned by Hiroshi Kaneko's family. And this was the area that we were allowed to live in, because when my eldest sister, Dorothy, and her husband first attempted to live in Chicago, they would go from apartment to apartment and they would say, "No Japanese here, we don't want Japanese people here." And then my sister would explain, "We are not Japanese, we're Japanese Americans," but they still didn't want us to live there. And so they realized that they had to make different accommodations, so Hiroshi's father, who had some means, purchased this apartment building. So it became convenient for many Nikkei to go live there, but it wasn't entirely, the building wasn't entirely occupied by Japanese Americans. In fact, Hiroshi, I just read this before I left Nelson, there was actually a prostitute living there, and he was arrested for it.

VY: Hiroshi was?

DC: Yeah, for having housed a prostitute. And, of course, he didn't know she was a prostitute when they bought the building. And evidently someone of some influence came to bail Hiroshi out and said, "Don't you arrest this person ever again." But that was the kind of neighborhood we were living in. So there were prostitutes there, probably drug dealers, and I believe that LaSalle Mansion was the hideout of Roger Touhy who was a member of, some gangster outfit, I don't know that much about Roger Touhy. But you know, Chicago always has this kind of legendary status of criminal activity and so on, but we were in the middle of it. And as I said, my sisters went to work against child labor laws, some of them worked at the McCormick Y. And my sister, Betty, tells me that they were not allowed to go through the front door, they could only go through the back door. And yeah, so they worked, but the ethnic neighborhood itself, okay, so I remember David Kaina, who was, his father was from Hawaii, and I believe his mother was white, so he was mixed race, so he lived in the building. There were other Japanese, Nikkei, of course, and then there was a Jewish couple that lived there. And so the school I went to was very diverse in its population, there were also Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood, and there were many restaurants, I remember restaurants everywhere.

There was the Diamond grocery store where we often bought food, and there was also this Toguri family that owned the Diamond grocery store, also owned the Diamond mercantile store, that's very famous. And that's where Iva Toguri worked. Now, Iva Toguri, when I was growing up, had this infamous reputation of being "Tokyo Rose." And I was a child then and I really didn't understand the significance of it, but as the truth came out, she was stranded in Japan, and she was not one of the people that FDR wanted to get back. And so she was incarcerated for a long period of time, she had even lost, she had a very tragic story, she was married to a man who came to testify on her behalf and was deported from the United States. And so she was not only, lost her child before returning to the United States, but she had also lost her marriage, her marriage was broken by the American government. And I think, if the truth were told, there were at least eighteen women who were used as broadcasters by the radio station that (Iva Toguri) went to work for, so she was not the Tokyo Rose, it wasn't the Tokyo Rose. And then there's even talk about the fact that there was no Tokyo Rose, that this was a name that the GIs made for whoever, whatever female was talking on the radio. And she, in fact, had done some extraordinarily humane things by giving aid to the American soldiers caught in Japan. And she unfortunately was in this neighborhood with us, a deeply marginalized individual. You never saw her at the dances, you never saw her at church functions.

VY: Excuse me, sorry. So at this point, she had been in jail already?

DC: Yes, and had been released. Thank you for asking that question. And when I became cognizant of her presence, I was in elementary school. And so, having internalized the racism that I was oppressed by, I would tell people, "I know Tokyo Rose." And they would say, "What? You know Tokyo Rose?" I said, "Yeah, she manages that store in my neighborhood." And so one time I took a friend there, and we were standing there and we were hiding behind one of the big displays, I would point out, "That's her, that's her," and we'd be giggling. Not realizing what a cruel thing that was to do. And she was very tough-looking. (You) could imagine anybody who's been through that experience would be, and now, looking back, I feel very sorry. But it was out of pure ignorance that I was acting in that way. And so William Hohri, who was my Sunday school teacher at the Christian Fellowship Church, he was instrumental in organizing the movement that finally resulted in her being pardoned by the American government. But certainly it took a long, long time for that to happen, and the poor woman suffered all that time. Yeah, I'm very sorry for her loss and what happened to her. So, yes, she made up many of the colorful figures that we knew in that neighborhood. And the Toguri family was very well-to-do and prosperous, influential. And when I moved to Canada, one of their relatives was my family physician, and it was very interesting, her name was Dr. Toguri. And so this was a prominent family that could afford to send their daughter to Japan for whatever reason they did right before the war for her to be caught there. And I was happy to learn many significant things from William Hohri as a result of his stories and his mentorship.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.